1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to steamers; and, more particularly, to a steamer for steaming rice or vegetables or the like where a plurality of different foods can be cooked at the same time.
2. Description of the Prior Art
People have become more health conscious in recent years and more attention has been directed to the steaming of foods. For example, valuable minerals are retained in vegetables if they are steamed rather than cooked by other means. At the same time, people doing such cooking are desirous of spending as little time as possible in the kitchen. Thus, automatic steamers and cookers have become popular in recent years.
In such prior art devices, many problems were encountered in steaming foods. For example, if the water being heated boiled away, food matter carried by the condensate would bake onto the heating surface of the water reservoir resulting in undesirable cooking odors and a messy clean up operation. Also, some prior art steamers required heating of a substantial amount of water thereby being less efficient than desired in today's energy concerned times. Such prior art devices also permitted condensate to accumulate with the food being steamed thus making the foods soggy and undesirable.
Finally, such prior art devices steamed only one food at a time and thus could not steam both rice and vegetables simultaneously, for example.
There thus is a need for a steamer which can simultaneously and efficiently steam more than one food item without collection of condensation around foods being steamed nor allow food matter to bake onto the heating surface when water boils away.